PRESS RELEASE
23 June 2003
Apple Previews Mac OS X “Panther”
More Than 100 New Features Push “Panther” Way Ahead of Competition
WWDC 2003, San Francisco - June 23rd, 2003
Apple today previewed Mac OS X version 10.3 “Panther”, the next major version of Mac OS X that will ship by the end of this year. The fourth major release of Mac OS X in four years, Panther sets a new gold standard for desktop operating systems with more than 100 breakthrough new features including a completely new Finder; Exposé, a revolutionary new way to instantly see all your open windows at once; and iChat AV, a complete desktop video conferencing solution for business, education and consumers.
“With Jaguar, we moved ahead of the competition. With Panther, we’rewidening the gap”, said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over 100 new features, including some real blockbusters, Apple is again the industryinnovator in operating systems”.
Panther features a completely new Finder that puts a user’s favouritefolders, hard drive, network servers, iDisk and removable media in oneconvenient location, providing one-click access to everything a user needs.The redesigned Finder also features lightning-fast search, coloured labelsfor fully-customised organisation of documents and projects and dynamicbrowsing of the network for Mac, Windows and UNIX file servers.
Panther also features Exposé, a revolutionary new way to instantly view allopen windows and choose any of them to be on top. Exposé visually unshuffles overlapping windows on the desktop into an organised view so a user can quickly find and select the window they want. Exposé will even temporarily clear the desktop of all windows, so users can get to any file on the desktop previously hidden by the open windows. Powered by the Mac OS XQuartz graphic engine, Exposé is a major advance in user interface designthat will change the way people work with multiple files, applications andprojects.
Building on the success of iChat, Panther extends instant messaging to thenext level with iChat AV. With full-screen, full-motion video overbroadband, crystal-clear audio over 56K modem and a familiar easy-to-useinterface, iChat AV makes natural conversations over the Internet immediateand effortless.
In addition, Panther includes FileVault, a new feature that secures thecontents of a home directory with strong 128-bit AES encryption. WithFileVault, users can select to have their whole home directory encryptedautomatically so it encrypts and decrypts files on the fly, withoutinterrupting their work. For mobile users, FileVault provides a new level ofsecurity on the road so if anyone ever tries to access a user’s account orif their notebook is lost, important data is always protected byhigh-security encryption.
Panther also includes new features that make it even easier for Macs toco-exist in Windows networks including an IPSec-based VPN for Microsoft andCisco networks, support for ActiveDirectory and SMB-based home directorieson Windows servers and enhanced Windows integration within the Finder thatenables printing to shared printers.
Mac OS X is the world’s most popular UNIX-based operating system and Panther adds system-wide advancements to UNIX-based technologies including X11 for Mac OS X, major performance improvements to NFS, a ports manager foraccessing open source projects, expanded Kerberos support, an integratedIPv6 networking stack and the ability to access Quartz graphics from Pythonprograms.
Additional new features in Panther include:
- an enhanced Mail application that organises email into convenient threads with drag-and-drop addressing and a Safari-based engine for displaying HTML formatted email;
- Fast User Switching, allowing users to share a single Mac and quicklyswitch between accounts without having to quit running applications andcompletely logout of the system;
- Pixlet, the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers that was developed in conjunction with Pixar to deliver breathtaking HD-quality video on the Macthat is free from visual artifacts;
- a fully integrated iDisk that increases productivity by automaticallysyncing a user’s offline work to their .Mac Internet server storage oncethey’re online again, so users can work locally on files with hard drivespeeds and have them synced automatically back to their iDisk later;
- integrated faxing synched with the Address Book so sending and receivingfaxes is as easy as printing, and includes support for adding cover pages;
- Font Book, a new application that provides system-level font managementwith double-click font preview, one-click installation and an intuitiveiTunes-like interface for managing font collections, and searching,activating and deactivating fonts; and
- a significantly improved Preview application that is the world’s fastest PDF reader with super-fast text searching that builds an instant index of search results in a PDF, text selection and copying, URL support and supportfor the PDF 1.4 format. Preview leverages powerful improvements to Quartzfiltering technology such as colourspace conversion, image sampling andcompression for advanced PDF workflows.
Pricing & Availability:
Mac OS X version 10.3 Panther will be available by the end of this yearthrough the Apple Store and Apple Authorised Resellers for a suggested selling price of £99 (inc VAT).
Mac OS X version 10.3 Panther will be available by the end of this yearthrough the Apple Store and Apple Authorised Resellers for a suggested selling price of £99 (inc VAT).
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